weeyin

First pint Kelly buys after lockdown will be for Maguire.

Better. Scrappy, but better. Hopefully, that will knock the stuffing out them and they collapse!

Feeble effort by Kelly - and can't even blame a bad bounce.

Narrator: and that is how internet rumours become fact.

You're making my argument here. Instead of the SFA investing in the infrastructure to develop Scottish players, they depend on substandard non-Scottish players to fill the gaps they created. As far as your ridiculous "purity law" statement goes - that's kind of the point of international football. If you want to see players from different countries playing in the same team there are one or two other options available.

Same here - I've always been against the grandparent rule in favour of the born in Scotland or one Scottish parent option. (The Scottish parents rule would still have made McBurnie eligible though, so it's not perfect).

I wouldn't worry about. Our injury record means that we rarely have competition for defensive spots for more than about one game.

In the old days, when Lafferty was at Hearts, we never seemed to lose when he scored against us.

I think it's just classic Steve Clarke, not making any changes to anything he thinks is working.

I don't think it's supposed to say anything about Motherwell FC any more than this is supposed to say anything about Barca (other than "we're supporting a charity with our away kit"): or Doncaster Rovers

I think that was Scott Brown they were talking about.

Picking up points at Rugby Park would be ideal, but even if we don't I'm still confident we have enough to keep us safe post-split. A must-win for Killie, though, which will make it a real scrap.

I think that's true regarding the SFA, but in theory at least, they are supposed to use the UEFA formula as their guide. It's at least better than the old system where you'd sell a player to the Old Firm who would immediately dispute the fee and the SFA would just divide the estimated value of a player by 10 and award that to the "wee" club.

These figures are from 2017, but I believe UEFA compensation works something like this. You receive a % for players' development between the ages of 12 and 21, depending on the category of club you are. Also, between the ages of 12 - 15 you only entitled to category 4 compensation regardless of what category of club you are. This is because the compensation is for development costs, and the 12 - 15 year olds are less expensive to train. The figures I see in the tables I linked are €10,000 for category 4 UEFA clubs, and €60,000 for category 2 UEFA clubs - which is the highest category in Scotland. So even if you use they older figures that works out at around €400,000 assuming we are are a category 2 club or about half that if were classified as a category 3. (I'm pretty sure we are Cat 2, but I can't find that list right now). The payments are only enforcable up to the player's 23rd birthday, but teams are free to make their own deals.

I used to enjoy trips to Killie, but since they went plastic I can't remember a single entertaining game there. So I'll settle for another hard fought, narrow win.

Would be nice to see two plastic pitches relegated and two grass ones promoted. No doubt, however, if a plastic pitch finishes in 11th they will win the play-off.

I think it's still the case that if the standard compensation rules are applied, it's still prohibitively expensive for us to sign young players developed in Scotland. Of course, clubs are are still free to make deals with different incentives like future transfer cuts and add-ons.

Maybe, maybe not. But then again, he didn't have many options as he joined us after the window opened and without a chance to fully assess what we had in the way of playing personnel. While some people like to think you just go out and find what you need in a weekend, as Robinson and others have pointed out - particularly in the January window - it can take months (or even years) to identify a target and work out an appropriate time to bring them in. To flip your scenario on its head, are we re we to believe that a manager who has turned down several positions because the circumstances weren't right for him is going to relocate his family to join a club a couple of miles up the road who struggling team in a relegation battle and for whom relegation is going to dent his reputation, would accept a role where he believes he can keep a team in the league with the already available players with the promise of full autonomy over the running of the team and with a promise of a budget and full control over signings in the summer would worry about a few loanees he can punt or ignore if he doesn't want them? Probably.

When you've seen this guy play in the sash, how can you not like it?

One of the reasons Craigan left is that he saw how the new Reserve structure was going to make it close to impossible to match the levels he had set. So no surprise that anybody who took over had a big challenge on their hands. With the lower leagues starting up again, no doubt we'll be trying to send out a few youngsters on loan again.

A few pics I've used as backgrounds in my video calls

I need to see that list of individual posters' comments on Covid related breaches over the past 12 months before I pass further judgement. A spreadsheet would be ideal, cheers.

I think you've answered your own question - it's so popular they had several re-ordering runs. So presumably, they are selling in sufficient numbers to make it profitable. I'm sure being one of the most famous tourist destinations with an iconic monster helps boost the sales around the globe.

I'm no expert on the specifics of clothing manufacture, but I have been involved with other products' manufacture and the challenge there is that there is a large up-front cost for design and tooling that needs to be clawed back. Once a production line is set up, the cost for each item made is (comparatively) minimal. If you are making 100,000 shirts you can divide that up-front investment 100,000 times and the economics are good. If you only shift 10,000 then splitting that cost results in much higher prices. And then there's the problem of switching the production line between variants. Every minute your production line is down costs you money. If you can run a product for a month with no changes, then that is much more profitable. If you are doing small runs and have to keep taking things offline to change the patterns and materials every few days, that is more downtime where you're not making any money. There will be other factors too, such as companies not wanting to tie up their best designers for low volume products, but I'd imagine the up-front sunk costs is the biggest barrier. I'm sure companies are less interested clubs our size too as they gain much less exposure to advertise their products.

I live in hope that as printing technology advances, which it's currently doing in leaps and bounds, that bespoke level designs might eventually become more realistic for small scale production runs.